Since Product Management (PM) is quite dynamic in practice, pinning down an exact definition is considered successfully unattainable. However, one of the simpler ways to conceptualize PM as put forward by The Product Book is as follows:
Product Management is the intersection of three core domains of a product — Product Design, Product Development and Product Marketing.
The first phase of Product Development Life Cycle, often termed as Discovery, is to find and clearly define the next opportunity to pursue and it should ideally begin with “understanding the company” that builds it. To confine the scope of ideation of a product from the sea of opportunities, one should tear down aspects of the company that contributes to its product success like company vision, target customers, expertise, competitive landscape etc.
For example, as LinkedIn focuses on building business and employment oriented services for an audience with professional context, websites and mobile apps would be an ideal opportunity for the company over a business oriented smartwatch or any other hardware product to begin with.
Breaking down how to analyze a company’s context
A strategic way to comprehend a company’s context is to analyze it across 5 major aspects:
1. Company Vision
As advocated by Simon Sinek in his book ‘Start With Why’, the core belief of a company should always be the guiding light to any product it designs. It will help you figure out what opportunity fits with the company’s reason to exist and what doesn’t.
‘Why’ is defined as the core of the Golden Circle because it is the most fundamental thing that helps you resonate with a company’s values.
LinkedIn Recruiter, a platform for finding, connecting with and managing candidates, resonates well with its company vision to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce”.
2. Business and Industry Specifics
Deliberately devote time and effort to learn how company processes work, who operates them, what tools and infrastructure the company is using, what opportunities the company has in terms of technology development and not least important, what budget it is willing to invest.
This will help realize a company’s elasticity to improvement and innovation, carefully select technology stack and methodology, eventually, build a relevant product for the company, its customers and end users. No business exists in isolation and therefore it is equally critical to study the environment around company’s business and understand the ecosystem it thrives in.
The decision to launch LinkedIn as an employment service seems fitting since back in 2002, there were very few social networking platforms in its industry let alone with professional interests.
3. Competitor Analysis
Determining a company’s competitive position is often missed out under the product’s competitive analysis. Understanding different strategies in competition is vital to scope an innovative opportunity and the best way to achieve it is by evaluating them from the user’s shoes. Done properly, it will give you plenty of quantitative and qualitative data to develop unique value propositions, uncover market segments, get benchmarks, prioritize features and even create a new product category.
Periodically revisiting and updating competitor analysis will help identify new trends in the market, business opportunities and industry best practices.
LinkedIn’s latest ‘Creator Accelerator’ program could be an initiative to stand out from its competitors by supporting growth of in-app content creators.
4. Target Market
Assessing how a product will fit into a specific market and who will form its core customer base will help the business to design effective marketing and sales techniques. It is found beneficial to identify most and least valuable markets, develop buyer personas, design proper product positioning and build tighter business strategies.
Target Market Analysis can be achieved by identifying plausible segments of market through research and then making projections for a selected ideal segment.
Since LinkedIn age demographics convey a rapidly growing presence of millenials, new specifications of the platform targeting the age group will likely be of demand.
5. SWOT Analysis
Extensively, identifying core strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a company leads to fact-based analysis, fresh perspectives and new ideas. While strengths and weaknesses lie internal to the company and can be changed over time with effort, threats and opportunities lie external, out in the market.
These conclusions will leave you with a well stipulated and communicable company profile facilitating a product design that can contribute to Growth, Revenue and/or Customer Satisfaction for a company.
Even though this formula is often proposed to understand the company who builds the product, I find selected aspects equally helpful to tear down and assess prospective client companies. Once the company context has been clearly identified and defined, it can be followed by building an Opportunity Hypothesis (Product Idea) based on those findings and then validating that hypothesis (Product Development).
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